Can architecture have moral value? The question sits at the heart of architecture yet is seldom asked. Last week a reader professed dismay that the opening paragraph of my column seemed to promise an essay on this question but led to something quite other. So, by request, here it is.

Words like “good” and “bad” are routinely applied to architecture - not with any intended moral content but rather in the sense of skilled, handsome or entertaining. But architecture has often seen itself as explicitly moral and not just in terms of its program – social housing or kindergartens – but in the thing itself.

Illustation: Simon LetchCredit:

John Ruskin, brilliant madman, held Gothic architecture to be “not a style but a principle” while reviling classicism as “base, unnatural, unfruitful, unenjoyable and impious”. Modernism, minimalism, Brutalism and functionalism all saw themselves as authentic in an expressly moral way; roots that gave 20th century architecture an intensity of purpose now altogether lost.

So at a time when every new building seems cheap jerry-built rubbish, the question is more-than-ever pertinent. Can architecture carry meaning? Can it be truthful, or in some other way morally good? Can it, as Ruskin thought, improve our moral powers? If so, how? Does it depend on the morality of the architect, developer or brief? Can a bad person make good architecture?

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Say you express your building’s structure or services for all to see (as Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers did, for example, in their Pompidou Centre in Paris), does that make it honest in some more-than-visual way? Or say, as former immigration minister Philip Ruddock did in 2001, you hold a design competition for a concentration camp (and yes, our asylum seeker detention centres do fit the definition), how do you pick a winner? What does a “good” concentration camp look like?

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Let’s go back to what architecture is for. First-year architecture students talk much about prospect and refuge. A good habitat offers both: the promise of safety and tang of adventure; the cave and the treehouse. This is an eternal human tension, our yearning for discovery perpetually contravening our craving for withdrawal; the safety of the room versus the adventure of the open plan. Architecture’s job, you might say, is to wrap its enabling fabric around these contrary desires.

Even this is not simple, since refuge may offer withdrawal either with others or from them; prospect may offer a sense of engagement or of command. But habitat is not architecture’s sole purpose.

There’s also its role as form; its aesthetic and symbolic content. Many argue that this, the semantics of form, is where architecture began; not as shelter but as monument, a defiant fist in the face of existential terror, a finger raised to the gods, a denial of death.

So there it is, form and function; shelter and the tomb. How might goodness, or its opposite, inhere in these?

The temptation is to judge form by function. We easily see the classicism of the Parthenon, with its lucent marble and airy colonnades, as representing the openness of Periclean democracy. But the exact same architecture was deployed to great effect by Albert Speer to manifest the tyranny of the Third Reich.

Bringing the inside out: Is the Pompidou Centre honest?

Conversely, the perennial impulse to blame “slum” neighbourhoods on their physical fabric demonstrates the same murky thinking. John Brogden’s 2004 insistence that the Block in Redfern should be demolished after the Thomas Hickey “riots” was the same misconceived kneejerk that saw Thatcher force the sale of all London council housing in the 1980s and now has the ACT government redeveloping almost the whole of Northbourne Avenue in Canberra from “troubled” public housing into slick private development.

In none of these cases is the architecture either good, morally, or bad. People don’t riot because of building damp or drain stink. They riot from rankling, cumulative, unacknowledged injustice.

Finally there are four avenues by which architecture can acquire moral heft; four opportunities for virtue. These are wellbeing, environmentalism, public-mindedness and beauty.

Glenn Murcutt has always treated architecture as a moral vocation.

Wellbeing is the least of them, being most self-focused. The ancients, naturally, were steeped in such wisdom but one of the earliest modern thinkers to document the link between health and architecture was Florence Nightingale. Noticing that Crimean War casualties healed faster near natural light and air, she produced designs for the lovely old St Thomas’ Hospital in London, where every bed had a massive window opening over garden and river. (This lovely thing is now superseded, of course, by a gargantuan monolith determined by trolley times and corridor lengths).

Then there’s eco-mindedness which, since it goes to species survival, is our pluralist era’s closest approach to a cohesive morality. Certainly Glenn Murcutt has always treated touch-the-earth-lightly architecture as a moral vocation. But is a 10-Green Star building properly described as morally good? Or is that more of a technical attribute?

By public-mindedness I mean that rare quality some buildings have of making you feel more significant, more dignified and more included, simply for passing by. This is almost a lost art, since no one will pay for it any more, and few architects have the skill.

Finally, beauty. Beauty is architecture’s highest virtue because beauty alone lifts you from your ego. I’m not talking object-beauty. The Taj Mahal is merely a nice thing. I’m talking beauty of the spatial experience, be it Westminster Abbey, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion or our own convict-hewn Argyle Cut. Beauty of this kind we love for its own sake, regardless of use or profit, and this transcendence is profoundly good for our souls.

So to the question, can architecture be morally good, the answer must be yes, if it enhances your life, cleans the planet, embraces the group and moves you beyond words. And by all means, professionals, take that as a challenge.

Elizabeth Farrelly is a Sydney-based columnist and author who holds a PhD in architecture and several international writing awards. A former editor and Sydney City Councilor, she is also Associate Professor (Practice) at the Australian Graduate School of Urbanism at UNSW. Her books include 'Glenn Murcutt: Three Houses’, 'Blubberland; the dangers of happiness’ and ‘Caro Was Here’, crime fiction for children (2014).